From Inside screens during Dead Channel's Festival of Fantastic Film

From Inside, the movie is playing at the Dead Channels Film Festival in San Francisco on Oct. 3 and Oct. 5!! John Bergin spent thousands of hours inking, painting and numbering the limited edition graphic novel and dedicated even more tedious hours animating it into a 71 minute film. The story of From Inside follows a pregnant woman on a train after a terribly destructive world event. Its tragic, sad and inspires haunting contemplation with unforgettable scenes of bleak landscapes and death. Dead Channels week-long festival begins October 2 and ends October 10 and will show films in San Francisco and in Oakland, CA. The film Latchkey's Lament screens with From Inside and is not a light-hearted screen 'toon about inanimate objects, rather a lively dark tale bounding with the struggle to survive and the quest for vengeance. The big screen is well-justified for both films, well-paired for fans of intricate animation and gloomy Sci-fi stories.

Dexter Season 2 on DVD

take the Dexter Test

Dexter's Psycho Therapy

then get the DVD of Dexter Season 2!

Captivating documentary on HBO

HBO Documentary Film series has featured Heidi Fleiss, Roman Polanski, and another must-see is Rory Kennedy's "Thank you Mr. President: Helen Thomas at the White House". I just loved the scenes they had of Nixon and Clinton. Really amazing that the White House Press Corps. tries to keep the President of the U.S.A. honest, yet the president's aides are actually telling the president not just what to say but what he cannot say. Who is really leading the country? What I saw here in the documentary makes a shadow government seem evermore possible.

TNT's Saving Grace is the next foray into television for Christina Ricci. Ricci's Emmy nominated work on Grey's Anatomy and work on Ally McBeal appears to have put her on the drama series track. She's playing a detective whom teams up with the series' lead character played by Holly Hunter. The first episode of the 2nd season has already aired and you can find it online or on your cable system's "On Demand" channel under TNT.

Roger Jackson, working all the time

My latest conversation with voice actor Roger Jackson brings excellent news. Coming from Electronic Arts on June 17 is a free downloadable demo called Spore, which is really something to behold. "It'll be revolutionary," says Roger, who plays lots of creatures in this game that will be known as a "Universe in a box." The demo will also be included in the The SimCity Box, which ships on June 23. The full retail version of Spore for PC and Mac launches on September 5, 2008 in Europe and September 7, 2008 in North America and you can import the creatures and worlds you made with the demo into the retail version. It means some more opportunity to use YouTube because, according to the press release, "Gamers can then share these creations with their friends, including seamless uploads to YouTube." Read more about it. He says that he finished the session for The Powerpuff Girls anniversary episode which is for a one-hour time slot, probably will air in the Fall of 2008 on the Cartoon Network. A song will be sung by Mojo Jojo; there's only one song in the episode. He can finally talk about the American McGee project called Grimm where he plays all of the voices. "It's puppet theatre meets animation," says Roger. Watch new game episodes weekly, released through Game Tap starting July 31. Listen for Roger's voice in a new release of My Sims in Fall 2008 that will be called My Sims Kingdom. In EA's Dead Space Roger plays a lot of different mutants. Hope the fun jobs keep going to him!

No fear, Reaper is back (midseason) 2009 on CW

The CW network did the smart thing by renewing "Reaper" which I hope remains true because it is not coming back until probably early 2009 as a midseason replacement. The writing is done well and I love the characters played by the actors I've loved in other short-lived series, namely Tyler Labine (Invasion), Ray Wise (Twin Peaks), and Christine Willes (Dead Like Me).

new Portishead album Third releases on 4/29

check out the band's You Tube channel.

Sugar, Spice, and Cartoonstitute

Famous for creating the girls known for "saving the world before bedtime" aka The Powerpuff Girls, creator Craig McCracken and Dexter's Laboratory creator Rob Renzetti have formed Cartoonstitute, "a new initiative designed to dramatically increase the animation development slate" for the Cartoon Network. I hope it really means it will create a lot of new jobs for people in the U.S. and not use cheap labor in foreign countries. I do love the shows that use this cheap labor, however there are so many promising animators-in-training in the U.S. eager to work for a television network like The Cartoon Network. I'll be watching for any developments so check back at Wednesday's Korner for word of any new shows.

 

Update: 11/08/2020 the above link is updated to shed light on why it wasn't developed beyond the formation.

EW interviews Speed Racer filmmakers

Check the latest Entertainment Weekly interview with the Wachowski brothers on Speed Racer due in theatres on May 9. Page 2 of the article shows a link to exclusive photos from the film. Christina Ricci plays Trixie and the exclusive photos can be found of her here and here. Several trailers can be viewed from this site.

Whedon's on Track with Dollhouse

Not really intending the track home community pun, but if you think about it, that'd be a sweet way to set up a loft consisting entirely of track home-style dollhouses. "Little boxes on the hillside..." Anyways, there are newsbits all about Joss Whedon's new TV project called "Dollhouse". I'm looking forward to it and it best damn well not be cancelled after ten shows air.

Penelope Review

Penelope has finally found its opening weekend and my review is as simple as this: Go SEE it in the theatre because it is a rare, wonderful, sharply comedic and quick-moving film. Support a movie in a theatre that uses great set designs which includes art by Joe Sorren and includes music by Sigur Rós. Chase scenes are not predictable. Penelope covers, in a few comical moments, what else would a person do who was confined to one house their entire life? I enjoyed the "who's real" and "who's fake" process of elimination and how one copes when you only find the latter. The characters are well-crafted and played by some of my favorite people, obviously Christina Ricci, but also minor characters played by Burn Gorman (Torchwood), Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead's Nick Frost, and the ever-watchable (getting all the laughs when I saw the movie) Peter Dinklage which you've seen in The Station Agent and Death at a Funeral, plus Marianne Faithfull is in it and she really is as great looking as I remember her from the brief appearance she made in BBC's "Absolutely Fabulous". The story's moral is powerful: embrace individuality. It's as simple as that and I would love a poster of this phrase on every street corner to remind those people that forget to do it.

Roger Jackson news

Roger Jackson writes to confirm that I did hear his voice on a Comcast commercial the other day, he says, "I am doing a couple of Comcast spots, one about 'We like math,' and one with something about 'Dreaming one of those big fat library full of HD movies only Comcast has- dreams.'"

"...Just did a program where I did gibberish SIMS-style of real-sounding fake languages as Salah-ah-din, a Tokugawa Shogun, Mahatma Gandhi, Otto von Bismark, Genghis Khan, a Pictish warrior, an African tribal hunter, and an English professor, among others."

The movie Control

Gosh, if you wake up on a sunny day and decide it is time to get depressed, you definitely will be after seeing Control, the biopic on Ian Curtis based on the book by his widow Deborah Curtis called Touching From a Distance.

There's a lot of information in this podcast interview with the actor who plays Ian, Sam Riley. He embodies this character extremely well, it is not just mimicing because any actor can train themselves to mimic someone well. The actors as a band perform the music for real, a choice I prefer, and they sound fantastic! Most importantly, Sam Riley plays Ian as a real person. I think this helps take the audience immediately to a level that does not glamorize this singer nor his life. Anton Corbijn films the movie in, as he says in this interview, black and white which is appropriate since most of the photos I've always seen of Joy Division are in black and white footage. I do not care much for the video he made of the song "Atmosphere" back when MTV showed music videos, so I was a little concerned that this could try to commercialize the band, but it doesn't. I'm also so glad that Corbijn uses the guy known as JCC (John Cooper Clarke) from the punk scene of the 1970s. I hadn't heard of him and I read his credit in the movie's credits. It's pure genius spoken word from a time that no spoken word was known of at all. You can hear the entire piece on the movie's official site by choosing the soundtrack and scrolling to the track "Evidently Chickentown." The Control version is without the backing music, unlike the "Sopranos" version.

I thought it was best to know no background about the making of the film before seeing it, however in the movie as I watched the characters move through Ian Curtis's hometown of Macclesfield, I really believed that the director chose to use the actual home of and workplace of Ian Curtis. I'm not sure, however, if the parents' home is the actual home. I was pleasantly assured after hearing the interview and another interview with Corbijn that, indeed, these locations were authentic.

I had a very dear friend of mine visit Macclesfield back in the '90s and he went to the boyhood home and stood outside. The residents looked at him from the window and even came out to talk to him, but he refused to go into their house. He went to the place where a stone was laid in Ian's honor. He researched it all in the Macclesfield library after having taken the earliest train out to the town from Manchester, I think. This friend of mine worshiped Ian and much of Joy Division and New Order's music to the point where he would not just randomly agree to watch a bootleg video of the band I just had lying around. It's all so sacred in his mind. He idolized Ian to the point of becoming fixated on suicide, had talked about it even as a teenager, and one day he did take his own life, unfortunately. He talked of the pain he felt in headaches he was experiencing and completely did not agree that the drugs worked. He didn't like the impurity of putting drug chemicals into a drug-free body... of having to take drugs to help him cope and I think he got this idea mostly from the knowledge of the side effects Ian experienced. Migraines can be kept from occurring quite successfully with drugs these days.

This friend was also mentally delusional, experiencing depression while he projected so much of his interpretation of how he wanted things to turn out directly onto people, thereby resulting in him being upset when he learned that their intentions did not match his deluded image of them.

I feel terrible that the loved ones close to Ian Curtis were not depicted much afterwards, long enough to express the toll it takes on a person's life in the years that follow a suicide because it is quite a process for the family and friends of suicide victims to process this sudden loss.

You can also read about what the daughter is doing while still living in Macclesfield.

Release the movie, already!

Glad to finally hear about a real theatrical release date for Penelope. "Summit Entertainment has obtained the rights to the film with plans to release it on February 1st, 2008," according to Variety. I've been watching the Bristish award-winning drama Shameless which also stars James McAvoy as Steve. He plays a guy named Max in Penelope and I am looking forward to the onscreen chemistry between him and Christina in this delicious fairy tale. He's going to be in a major pic in 2008 as he plays in Wanted as Wesley along with another really great underrated actor, Thomas Kretschmann.

Podcast with Christina Ricci from Australia's Sunday Telegraph

Everyone should take a listen to a powerful podcast with Christina Ricci talking to the Sunday Telegraph. Then you can go to the Speedracer movie site and see below Christina's cute new haircut:

Aliens among us; it's in the fungus

The former governor of Arizona just announced that he did indeed see the mysterious lights over Arizona in 1997 better known as the Phoenix lights. "'It was bigger than anything that I've ever seen'" he says. Uh-huh.

I'm waiting for the next invasion and not this one, as I read an article attempting to debunk the red rain that fell in India in 2001.

I'm a fan of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978 movies) and wonder if the drones that serve me coffee in some establishments are they way they are because they've been switched. Though I do have to say that I seldom answer honestly when they ask me how am I doing when all I need is a large coffee to get my heart moving in the morning. "Oh, fine, hanging in there," yet I am really wondering "How many earth creatures have you snatched lately?" It is rather a cult, routine coffee rituals from morning to night. I try to go to different places so as to spread the wealth. My favorites are often the locally-based chains rather than the national chains or not a chain but an isolated internet-friendly cafe needing a friendly face to serve.

updated links on 11/08/2020

We finally can watch the trailer for Penelope and I love the rest of the cast joining Christina Ricci for this fun tale. James McAvoy is going to charm us again like he did as the doctor in The Last King of Scotland.

Also, there's a great article today in the San Francisco Chronicle on a taxidermist and a collector of Victorian taxidermy.

If ghost hunting is your thing, check out Philadelphia Ghost Hunters Alliance tour of a gothic prison.

Lastly, I updated the guide for finding all titles that star Roger L. Jackson, the voice actor, though this is not a complete list of all the work he's done in the most recent years. He's been a regular actor for all of the Mucinex commercials you may have seen. I think the stuff works, too. Of course, Zicam, if you follow its directions, works so that you don't have to get sick enough that you need Mucinex.

follow-up on Kim Richards

The previous post mentions my fondness of Kim Richards in the Disney movies and in the latest movie, Black Snake Moan. Well she's on this web page talking about what she was doing leading up to being called to be in the movie. I had no idea that she is Paris Hilton's aunt. Too weird.

On-screen dazzling duo starts out as odd couple in Black Snake Moan

I can't stand it when people turn to judging a movie as being misogynist, only basing their opinion on a trailer before they go see it for themselves.

The movie Black Snake Moan, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Christina Ricci, written and directed by Craig Brewer (Hustle and Flow), provides a faithful, Memphis-country flavor without coddling you through the thick accents and how one roughs up a whore. Of course, it's a given, Samuel L. Jackson could quote the bible while portraying Lazarus just as poignantly when he spoke as Jules in Pulp Fiction. However, here in farm country, it is more fitting for him to be God-inspired Lazarus while having just split with his wife, getting stumbling drunk on 'shine, playing the blues like he was born with a guitar in his hands, then suddenly discovering a petite half-naked, beaten-nearly-to-death girl just on the edge of his dwelling that he has to nurse back to life. This is where the trailers wrongly advertise the movie... it's not all about chaining Rae down so that he can brainwash her into finding God or Jesus or anything like that at al. There are moments when yes, you can agree with what Rae says, she's able to take care of herself (on the surface), but when you see these trancelike states she fallen into again and again, you feel grateful Lazarus has tied her down for a while because her wandering just leads her into self-destruction -- the kind that a person may not live through next time. She learns so much about self-worth and about living right by being around Lazarus; how to control urges, like in life, temptation will always be there... it's how she learns to do what's right for her life; do what's good for the soul and what's worth remembering for years to come. Note: Christina Ricci is outstanding in her portrayal of Rae as hard-edged where it is clearly no irony, while watching her, you may recall Charlize Theron paving that same road of transformation in playing Aileen Wuornos.

Kim Richards plays Rae's mom. A little about this actress and why she is so significant: she was Tia in "Escape to Witch Mountain"! I was always excited, as a child, to see these movies and TV shows Disney (under "The Wonderful World of Disney") released or aired in the '70s. She is still so great to watch and her character, Sandy, is important to Rae's history in order to demonstrate where Rae's life could have been held together much better years ago (along with the eerie flashes of memory that Brewer portions out to the audience, letting 'em take it in gradually--keepin' 'em intr'ested).

Other notable character acting is well-handled by Justin Timberlake in his portrayal of Ronnie, Rae's sweetheart of a guy. This character is much like how most poverty-living guys are when they have nothing waiting for them after high school, so they impulsively join the military in order to make some money to better their lives. S. Epatha Merkerson ("Law & Order" and Reba from "Pee Wee's Playhouse") is wonderful as Angela; she's a grounding force in Lazarus's life and refreshing with her performance in every scene.

I highly recommend the soundtrack as it is one of the best blues performances I've witnessed on screen with genuineness coupled with the dance floor depicted in sexy slow-mo -- a very hot and memorable section of the movie.

This is a movie that you just have to see for yourself to understand that the juxtaposition between Ricci and Jackson is odd outside of the context, but watching Rae and Lazarus up close, you feel like it is a relationship that came together when two people were lost in a bunch of negativity -- just a couple of lives that needed a deeply positive direction, in which these two souls found themselves while being found by each other.

Black Snake Moan

1. Black Snake Moan had an early review on Ebert & Roeper the weekend of 2/18/07 and two major thumbs up from Kevin Smith (Roep liked it too, but I don't care what he thinks, EVER).
2. the movie has an excellent website
3. Christina Ricci can be found in Esquire online, possibly in print (haven't found it in the store yet).
4. She's also interviewed in MoviesOnline from Canada.